In recent years, environmental issues is one of the important social issues, and it is an important issue to reduce energy consumption among them. Any information processing device (computer) consumes powers for running. In particular, a large computer consumes greater power.
For analysis of the power consumption of the computer, it has been proposed to use hardware mechanism as the performance counter. The performance counter can measure the number of occurrences of a particular event, such as a cache miss.
For example, a first method is to update the performance counter by adding weights to the value of the events that occur in each functional block within the processor. The power consumption of the processor is predicted by using the value of this performance counter. Another method is to determine the power consumption by a temperature from the temperature sensor provided to the processor and an operating rate by the performance counters. These proposals are effective to monitor the power consumption of the computer.
Further, the another method is for tuning the program by embedding a special code to the program to be measured and displaying a time series relationship between the program and the power values which are measured using a power meter at a timing to execute the special code of the program.